Top 47 Quotes & Sayings by Sam Wanamaker
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American actor Sam Wanamaker.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
This is more than just the rebuilding of the Globe, creating some kind of monument to Shakespeare which he doesn't need. His books are his monuments. But this will be a major center for the study of Shakespeare in performance. We are making the only faithful effort to restore the theater in every respect as close to the original as possible.
Since the theater is going to be reconstructed in the techniques of joinery craftsmanship as it was before, it will take longer to make. It will be a complex of buildings, not just the Globe, with a major permanent exhibition of the Elizabethan theater.
What I want is an international monument to the world's greatest playwright. It would be an attraction that would be both educational and an automatic sight for tourists, like St Paul's and the Tower of London. It would be built with honesty and integrity not another Disneyland, but as nearly as possible a replica of the original Globe Theatre.
When I first went to London to do a film in 1949, I naturally went to visit the site of the Globe. There was this small plaque on the side of a grimy brewery wall in a derelict alley near the riverfront. I was shocked.
We hope the Bell Shakespeare Company will become an indigenous part of the Globe Shakespeare Centre in Australia.
We will get back to the earlier, instinctive and less inhibited nature of theatre. Today, spectators are passive, but Elizabethan, Greek and Roma; theatre was interactive.
I became a producer because of projects I wanted to pursue and develop as a director or actor.
That first replica of the Globe that I saw at the Chicago World's Fair was a suspect thing, made of plywood and papier-mache. But I kept seeing other replicas at other fairs in the '30s, so I developed a longing to see London.
In my teens, I saw a terrible production of 'Die Walkuere.' To a person of 15, it was just awful, and it put me off for many years. Eventually I became an opera-goer, if not an opera buff.
Shakespeare belongs to the whole of mankind, not just one country.
I had been in 760 performances of 10 different Shakespeare plays by the time I was 17.
I'm not a Shakespearean actor really, or a Shakespearean director.
Shakespeare is undoubtedly the greatest dramatist the world has known, and 95 countries translate his work into their languages.
My middle daughter is with the Royal Shakespeare Company and was on Broadway several years ago.
I am kind of a curiosity in England.
What would the world say if the Globe, now that it has at last been found, is not excavated?
Shakespeare is as naturally a part of American culture as it is the British culture; the Americans have a natural interest in their heritage.
It's true that I have sacrificed certain jobs, and it's been a matter of fitting my career into the Globe rather than the other way around.
It's very difficult to know exactly what a major audience is going to respond to. 'We know they respond to certain personalities. That has been proven by the success of certain people in television who have gone from show to show and carried an audience with them. Apart from that, it's very hard to say what formula works.
Now I do perhaps three films or 17 TV movies a year.
When I was 15 years old, I saw my first production of a Shakespeare play at the British pavilion at the Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago.
Frankly, the British always looked at this as a dumpy industrial area, but this was where Shakespeare lived and wrote and performed some of his greatest works.
The Ides of March? That doesn't worry me.
England is a mecca for actors who want to do the classics.
I mean, the Globe is the most famous theater in the western world. The British have absolutely neglected it. It's an embarrassment to them that they haven't done anything about it.
What could be more fitting - or more exciting - than to restage Shakespeare's plays on the very spot where they were first performed, in the shape and style of theater for which they were written?
The only thing that I can contribute as director is to work with the performers in a way that brings out the drama.
Of course, the Globe will be an international educational center as well as a theater.
People constantly express surprise that Americans are so hot for Shakespeare. But Britain's culture is American culture, too.
The physical nature of the Globe is going to break down a lot of barriers.
Shakespeare is, after all, Britain's greatest poet and dramatist.
Most Britons, and most Americans as well, either thought the Globe was in Stratford-Upon-Avon or didn't know where it was at all.
I think the Schwontkowski banner will help publicize the construction of the new Globe and probably will also help fundraising.
I'm not interested in creating a self-aggrandizing home base for myself, for my artistic foibles and interests.
You could argue we are a different audience today,but on the other hand what is it that makes Shakespeare great? It is that he understands the common denominator of man, his emotions and relationships.
I've lived in London more or less permanently since the 1950s.
I foresee the Globe attracting scholars from all over the world.
The Globe will become an automatic sight like the Tower of London and St. Paul's.
There are more movie stars in the lobby of the Aquadulce than there are in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Through the years, I had became involved with social and political issues, such as racial discrimination.
I've always been in institutional theater.
Two planeloads of California actors and directors flew to Washington in support of the Hollywood Ten, and some of us, like John Garfield, came down from New York. There's a very famous Life magazine cover with Bogart and Bacall sitting in the hearing room. I was in between them.
I admit we don't know for sure the exact spot where the original Globe stood. But the Greenmore Wharf site is as nearly right as we can figure.
The British are much more cynical and regard the idea of a Globe reconstruction as an Elizabethan Disneyland. But the Americans have a real hunger for what they see as their history, their culture and their Shakespeare.
Unlike young actors, I don't feel unfulfilled. I've had my successes. I don't have to worry that I won't have time for other things.
The Globe is a missing monument. There's no existing example of a theater from Shakespeare's time. You have Roman theaters, Greek theaters, all kinds of theaters, but none in which the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Marlowe were performed. Scholars feel that it would be of immense value to have one.
You can do something almost any minutes that will ruin you, no matter how good you have been.
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